how to serve decent drinks

Look what I found on joost (disclaimer: I work there) hidden away in the cooking category:

• how to store wine
• how to serve wine
• making margaritas
  
• making cosmopolitans
• making mojitos
• making bloody maries

oh, and once you’re past that first hangover…

• lots of margarita recipes

feedburner messing up my feed??

I’ve tried to disable flickr consumption for now. How weird. Thanks to ColmMac for reporting 🙂

Life-changing experience: Halo 3

I’ve never really been much of a gamer, but I’m a big admirer of the underlying technology, so I bought an XBOX 360 a while ago.

I played Mass Effect, given I’m an RPG addict. Lot’s of fun, though I struggled with the controls for quite a while. I did figure it out eventually, but the final boss fight still took me about a dozen times before I succeeded.

Then I played about half of Assassin’s Creed. It looks really nice, but once I figured out the game mechanics I got bored – the game is somewhat repetitive, and the story-line is not very interesting.

So I started on Halo 3. I generally suck at these real-time shooting games, and Halo was no exception. I just couldn’t get through the third or fourth mission; I kept dying.

That is, until last weekend, when I restarted the game in easy mode. It felt a bit like admitting to myself that I’m not a Real Man, but at least I made progress. I didn’t have any time to play during the week, but I played all day (and half of the night) yesterday, and now I’ve just finished the campaign.

Wow. Truly a game of epic proportions, with a production quality easily rivalling that of a hollywood blockbuster. The experience of the final scene alone was worth the price of the console plus all the hours invested in getting there.

So, my advice to you…if you haven’t yet, go buy an xbox. They come in special Halo 3 editions.

In the meantime, I also have a question: what game could hope to impress me after Halo?

App Engine is an interesting start

So I looked at google’s App Engine today. Some thoughts:

1. We need to know what it costs.
2. Yay for WSGI.
3. Yay for Apache 2 licensing.
4. Let me deep-link to the code.
5. Amazon provides more power. For example, queues.
6. As others have said the lock-in risk needs some attention. I’m sure someone will solve it soon.
7. I still don’t believe we’ll stop distributing entity relationships. They are useful. Facebook at least provides subselects. Amazon doesn’t.

All in all, if I were to launch some new web app today, I would probably still do that on Amazon S3/EC2.